[saclark11]

> Overall, pretty weird stuff. I am not sure why the Go team went down this route. Maybe it simplifies the compiler by having this bespoke assembly format?

Rob Pike spoke on the design of Go's assembler at a talk in 2016 [1][2]. I think it basically came down to the observation that most assembly language is roughly the same, so why not build a common assembly language that "lets you talk to the machine at the lowest level and yet not have to learn a new syntax." It also enables them to automatically generate a working assembler given an instruction manual PDF for a new architecture as input.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KINIAgRpkDA [2]: https://go.dev/talks/2016/asm.slide#1

[alphazard]

And it worked. Go established cross-compilation as table-stakes for new programming languages, at a time when very few were doing it well, if at all.

[cloudfudge]

Yes, this is a great leap forward in my opinion. I had to do a project at a previous job where I wrote an agent that ran on x86, MIPS and ARM, and doing it in Go was a no-brainer. The other teams who had a bunch of C code that was a nightmare to cross-compile were so jealous they eventually moved a lot of things to Go.

I've been doing this for 35 years and cross compiling anything nontrivial was always a toolchain nightmare. Discovering a world where all I had to do was set GOARCH=mips64 (and possibly GOOS=darwin if I wanted mac binaries) before invoking the compiler is so magical I was extremely skeptical when I first read about it.

[p_l]

Go essentially copied the design from Plan9 compilers, which it was originally based on. It's one of the many things it inherited from Plan9 environment.

[lifthrasiir]

While good cross-compilation is one of Go's strengths... I don't really think a unified assembly language contributed to that? Any assembly code can't be shared across multiple architectures in general, so the only potential benefit would be the easiness of parser development, which doesn't sound like a big thing. Rob Pike himself even noted that it can be offputting to outsiders but considered it's a worthy trade-off nevertheless [1], the conclusion I don't really think justified.

[1] https://go.dev/talks/2016/asm.slide#32

[sweeter]

This is by far one of the best parts of Go. Its all around simple and painless to use. anyone designing a language should study what Go did well and what they didn't.

[pjmlp]

The idea isn't new, for example Amsterdam Compiler Kit from 1980's.

[Yoric]

FWIW, that's also more or less what SpiderMonkey has been doing for ~25 years (and I presume other JavaScript VMs).